On the Route
by nunwithachainsaw
Summary: Ash Ketchum travels through Kanto with his girlfriend Misty and the wild joyous holy man Brock, discovering all the blinding beautiful intensity of life in all its forms along the way. Rated T for language, sexual situations, and illicit drug use.
1. Chapter 1

**Compiler's Note**: Hello, readers. My name is David. I regret to inform that my daughter, Sarah, was recently killed by internet trolls. As part of my healing process, I've been going through her old writings and doodles and have managed to piece together a mostly complete manuscript which she had tentatively named _On the Route_. Because Sarah was only fifteen years old, I find it somewhat difficult to believe that she would have been familiar enough with Jack Kerouac or, indeed, any of the famous beat writers to have been influenced by _On the Road_. But the contents of her Avengers folder, which held the majority of her unfinished works, do appear to bear some degree of beat influence. I present the story here in its unaltered state; the typos are hers, the lust for life, hers, the characters—Nintendo's, I suppose, although her uncle does work for that corporation and would doubtlessly have granted her permission to use them. She left no author's notes. Although _On the Route_ is a stylistic departure from her better known work, _Youngster Joey's Savage Journey Into the Heart of Kanto_, I believe that those readers who were not trolls or haters will find they can still hear her literary voice in these words and pages. Rest in peace, Sarah. We all love and miss you very much.

* * *

**1**

When I met Brock I was still just a boy, only just a boy; likely no older than ten, the age at which I was thrown bodily from my mother's house by her Mr. Mime and made to realize that I had reached my childhood's end. I didn't know then that such a wildman as Brock could have been born and bred in this great land of Kanto, that he could have come roaring straight from the heart of the country I thought of as my home, piloting a crazy three-person tandem bike like a smiling laughing demon with a lust for life so shining and magnificent that it blinded all but those as innately holy as he. With the coming of Brock began the portion of my life that I think of as "on the route"... the freewheeling endless summer of foreign skylines and breathless gym battles and girls and drugs and route number signs by the dozens and dozens.

I first heard mention of Brock through my network of friends—Joey, that mad gone youth whose greatest pleasures in life were his cellular telephone and his uncontrollable fancy for lysergic acid diethylamide, Pikachu, my Pokémon, and Misty, who was then my devoted girlfriend. Ten years old and already neck deep in love—that was me, that was Ash. That was me. I wrote letters daily, hilarious ten thousand word epics addressed to Misty My Dearest Only and Misty Gonnest Soul Among Gone Souls. I churned them out on my portable typewriter and crammed them into any mailbox I could find, sometimes forgetting the stamp, often returning home for a week or two and finding that they'd come back in the mail unstamped and unread, because my mind was so often elsewhere in those days. I was ripe and ready to be plucked by the madman Brock, ready to be placed on the route and wound up and set loose in his frantic gone dream of life in all its blazing beauty and sorrow. I had a powerful need for life, a great burning thirst that I didn't even yet know how to name. It was a party where we met Brock, I now recall; a party in Pewter City, not long after I'd gotten Misty in Viridian Forest. Joey was there, laughing and slobbering and sweating and writing music on heroin and Misty and I were sitting together with our heads touching as we smiled and listened to Joey's guitar and people's voices. Joey had assured us that Brock would be there, this mad gone cat he'd dug up in a tavern in some little town he'd forgotten the name of long ago, and that we had better be there too because Brock was something else.

I don't recall seeing Brock enter the room but I remember knowing he was there and seeing him and and knowing which one he must surely be. He was a tall squint-eyed lunatic with an orange hunting vest thrown on over a green t-shirt and khaki pants and he was always laughing and running around and just seeing what was going on in every corner and every mind. That's all I can remember from that first night. Misty and I found ourselves hours later sitting back in Viridian Forest at sunrise around a dead campfire listening to Brock shout and pound his fist into his palm and laugh and tell us all the things he'd seen and done already this summer. "Yass, yass," Brock screamed with a joy so pure and free I could hardly believe it was real, "now Ash m'boy dig this wild Caterpie struggling along in the good holy soil of the earth, the _earth _man, the very same earth that grew these magnificent gone trees that stand around us quiet and wise; look at those eyes now, I want you both to watch this—look how the sunlight glints off the nice little fellow's body segments and defines the shape of those wild eyes—gods, what I would _give _to have eyes like that! Yass, oh yass!" He was sweating visibly. He sweated a great deal all the time, was always moving much too fast, thinking too many thoughts at once, was too stoned on the crazy complexity of reality to ever need any drug any harder than marijuana, which he called potion. "Ash m'boy, Misty m'gone girl, do either of you fine cats have any potion? Oh boy, let's roll us a potion and hit the route and we could be in Viridian City by lunch time to have lunch in front of the Pokécenter where we can dig that gorgeous cat Nurse Joy through the window! Hooo, whee!" He didn't even mind when neither Misty nor I produced any pot. He had probably already forgotten. He threw us onto the back of that mad yellow bicycle of his with the three tandem seats, he in front, I in back, and Misty squeezed between us with her tired head hanging forward nearly onto Brock's shoulder, and then we were pedaling. I'd never known anything like that bike. Brock kept us flying down the route at a steady 90 miles per hour, feet spinning and mouth jabbering and hands pointing things out to us the whole time whether we were paying attention to him or not. "Now Misty lovely Misty of the mists, dig this wild mad sick cloud that looks ex_actly _like that Officer Jenny that patrols Routes 7 through 9—you've never been there? Never even seen Mount _Moon_?! Misty, my girl, you—haven't—_lived_!" He resolved to show us life, and that was that; we were a team from then on. That bike ripped through route after route, town after town, tavern after tavern, through the moonlit fields and sun splashed horizons of my native land, and when I think now of that land and of that wild condition called life I think of Brock, I think of Brock, I think of Brock.


	2. Chapter 2

**2**

So we were on the route, and it was finally in an official sense. I'd never put so much distance behind me in one day before; terrain flashed by as Brock cackled madly and demonstrated for us fishing techniques, cooking techniques, Pokéball throwing techniques—and all while somehow maintaining that blistering 90 miles per hour. At one point he whipped a Great Ball out into the woods and captured a Metapod that, for all I know, never saw the light of day again. He just left it there in the ball on the side of the road without even a backward glance or a polite application of the brakes. He was already on to the next thrill. Misty looked back over her shoulder at it, but it was already too far in the distance and her eyes were bleary with wind and sleeplessness.

Brock swung us off before Viridian City to stop and have a bite to eat with this cat he'd met on one of his previous expeditions across the face of Kanto. The man was a samurai and lived in a tiny sequestered hut in a clearing deep in the forest. We had to get off the bike and carry it on our backs like a long yellow crucifix, because the weeds and growth were too thick to pedal through. How could Brock have made it out this far on his own? No one asked. Misty and I were both getting as high as Brock was on the sunlight and the smells and chitters of bug types and the breeze, and we were having trouble being concerned with things like "how."

My cell phone rang and I let Brock answer it; he had never used one, he said, and was "dying man, just _dying _for a new experience!" It turned out to be Joey. I only heard half of the conversation:

"Well goodest of good mornings my good gone fellow or fellette on the other end of this device—yass—ye gods, yass, yass! Tell me again! Yes… you say it's in the top percentile? Impossible… but maybe… yass, yass! Oh yass, Joey! YASS!"

And with that he flung my cell phone off into the woods with a shriek of manic pleasure. We made only a half-hearted search for it; I'd never much enjoyed the late night calls I frequently got from Joey when he was deep in one of his mescaline trances and blistering with excitement about the profound level of pure existence enjoyed by his Rattata.

Finally we found the samurai's hut just as I was sure Brock was nearing the point of dehydration due to all the sweating he was doing. He peered out of his slitted eyelids with crazed happiness and dropped the front end of the bike to run and pound with both fists on the door of the hut. When the samurai answered, Brock leapt into the darkness of the man's dwelling and pinned him to the ground with a hug. It was the purest affection I had ever seen and my heart swelled with vicarious joy. We ate grubs on the man's dusty wooden table.

"By the way," the samurai said, "these are Beedrill larvae."

Misty looked at me with shocked eyes.

"And the Beedrill aren't too happy about it," the samurai admitted.

Brock thumped the table with his closed fist and let out a wild laugh. "Of course they aren't!" he screamed. "But to hell with them! To hell with them! Oh, yass!"

"And they're coming for revenge," the samurai concluded.

That was when we heard the buzzing. It filled the air like a flock of tiny helicopters still miles out but closing, closing.

"Well, old boy, fantastic to see you again—never did get your name—oh yass, yass!—next time we'll surely bring a bottle of wine or something, but we really must be off—too many gone adventures yet to live and too many beautiful girls to meet out there in that great big phenomenal world we're standing on—"

"Good bye," Misty screamed, dragging Brock and I out the door. We ran through the woods with the bike bouncing on our shoulders, our breaths coming out in ragged gasps of excitement. The Beedrill were getting close, but Brock wasn't worried. We at last found the route again and could pedal back up to our traditional 90.

"Will they kill him?" Misty asked Brock.

"Kill him? _Kill _him, Misty of the mists? Well golly, I guess I don't even know. Say, have you cats ever dug that wild daycare center where they raise your Pokémon just for walking in circles? It sounds mad but I swear it's the biggest scene you could ever hope to dig! Wooo eee, to hell with that Nurse Joy! She's got sisters all over the place anyway. Let's just blast over to Cerulean where my lovely sister Misty of the mists hails from and check out the daycare!"

But, as it would turn out, there were many more things to be dug between here and there for our little party of merry travelers. We roared through groups of trainers, making eye contact and then blasting away leaving them only our laughter to satisfy their bizarre cravings for violence; they wanted to battle us to pulp, we could all feel it, but none would; we were simply moving too fast. For all I knew a sonic boom was trailing our bike and shattering windows and knocking the trainers' Pidgeys stone dead out of the air wherever we went. We roared past a waterfall and caught the mournful gaze of a sad old fisherman who'd spent his life collecting a team of six muscular Magikarp with which to dismantle his foes. In his eyes we could all see the need to fight, to rip us to shreds with his Magnificent Six, but Brock was too explosively high on life to let it happen. He just flew past with one hand raised in greeting to the bloodthirsty sailor, who threw up his middle finger in return. Before long night was falling again and we were out on the prairie with Mount Moon knifing up in the distance, a blank silhouette slouching toward the stars. Brock was once more drenched in sweat and decided to remove his clothing. Misty and I, both ten years old, shielded our eyes and made our camp a ways off from Brock. We could hear him for hours before we slept, laughing and telling himself stories and jokes.

"Brock's a little crazy," Misty whispered to me in the dark of our sleeping bag.

"He just loves life is all."

"I love life too, but…"

"What is it?"

"Nothing. Good night." And she turned away from me, pressed her back into my chest, and we slept.


	3. Chapter 3

**3**

In the morning we couldn't get Brock to put his clothes back on, so I offered to ride middle, between him and Misty. The wind slapped against us in hard sheets that felt thrown from the very disc of the sun as we hurdled toward Mount Moon and whatever wonders there were beneath and beyond it.

People eventually began to line the route waving trinkets and little things they wanted to sell us; healing items, nick knacks, evolutionary stones. Brock squealed with glee and slammed on his brakes as we flew past, but Misty and I weren't interested and we kept pedaling. Brock's head turned further and further, grinning, his feet motionless, until the vendors were out of sight and he forgot about them and went back to helping pedal.

"Did you cats _see _those cats!"

"No," Misty shouted.

When we finally had traversed enough of the snaking path that wound up to the base of Mount Moon to reach the small travelers' rest hut, even Misty was ready to stop. We climbed off the bike. Brock danced and laughed his way inside and immediately got to shaking hands and clapping backs. It was a sauna. _Everyone_ was naked, at least to their towels. Misty and I changed with our eyes averted shyly from one another and went to sit beside Brock in the steam room, where he was conversing with a sketchy looking fellow with a pointed face and long black hair on only one side of his head.

"Check it out, cats, it's Indica," Brock said as we sat down.

"Who?"

"N. Dica, actually," the man said with a predatory grin, his hand outstretched for a shake.

"This cat's the gonnest old soul there ever was," Brock explained. "Say, N, you happen to know where we can grab hold of a little of your namesake?" N. Dica laughed and pulled out a baggie of potion.

"Ash, I don't want to smoke with these guys," Misty whispered furiously in my ear. "I want to leave."

I hesitated. I _did _want to smoke with these guys, a little. Misty got up and left the steam room to go put her regular clothes back on and wait by the bike while N. Dica rolled the biggest bomber joint anyone in the room had ever seen. Brock lifted this thing with both hands and mumbled a prayer over it; it was as thick around as my thumb and nearly five inches long. We let Brock light it. When it finally came around to me, I took one puff and was instantly as gone as the gonnest old gone soul that ever left. Hitting that joint was like sucking on an industrial smoke stack, furnace heat blasting down your throat and lighting the fire in your belly once and for all. My eyes watered. We got dressed and went back to the bike.

"Well well well well well well, goodest morning, Misty my finest Misty of the gone old mists," Brock said.

"You guys are jerks," said Misty.

Brock cackled and told her, "Aw."

We roared into the throat of Mount Moon. We had to lean sideways with our knees just inches off the ground like motorcycle pilots to maintain our 90 miles per hour around the sharp turns and steep inclines under the mountain. It was all very exciting and fresh. Blissful shivers of pleasure stabbed through my shoulder blades. Brock did his best to teach us the legends and culture of the Clefairy, but Misty wasn't in the mood and I was too stoned to follow. I kept laughing every time he said the word "Clefairy."

"But what do they _do _here?" I wanted suddenly to know. "I mean, what on earth are they _doing _down here?"

"They're just living, Ash m'boy!" Brock howled. "These gone little fellows are the purest souls I ever saw, swear it on my mother! Look at the way they dance! Hooo, get out! Watch this, Misty! Watch how that little one just looks at the others, nude and terrified! Look at those soulful eyes! Look how they make their secret lives underneath this crazy second earth upon the earth! Never have I been so struck by the plight of a native people of this great good land…"

The Clefairy began to throw rocks at us. Misty screamed and shielded her face as we ripped along a narrow ledge that encircled the Clefairys' sacrifice pit. A rock bounced off Brock's shoulder but he only laughed as we sped away.

"What was that?" Misty suddenly asked.

"Those? They were Clefairy," Brock replied. I laughed.

"No, that stuff we just crunched over."

"Oh, just some useless fossils," Brock said casually. I looked back over my shoulder and witnessed a group of scientists rushing to gather the shards of their life's work, priceless fossils of Omastar and Kabutops. Some of them were weeping, but I couldn't quit laughing.

"Ash gets it!" Brock screamed, and turned to clap me on the shoulder. The bike fishtailed wildly. "Old Ash is so gone he gets everything!"

We burst forth into the sunlight with a cloud of pursuing Zubats gnashing their teeth at our backs. Brock threw Great Balls and entrapped several, left them lying forevermore on the side of the path, naked and helpless to prevent whatever fates would come.

We stopped finally for the night in the Cerulean Pokécenter. Brock took the Nurse Joy that worked there into the back room and we heard springs creaking in rhythm for nearly forty minutes. When Brock finally returned, he was once more without his clothes.

"Either of you cats got some pants I can wear for a bit?" he asked, looking pointedly at me. "We, uh… my old clothes are no good anymore."

I rummaged around in my bag and came up with a washcloth that Brock tied around his waist with a bungee cord like a homeless Tarzan. Misty was unhappy and said she was going to spend the weekend with her parents, who hadn't seen her since they'd thrown her out on her tenth birthday to fulfill her Pokédestiny. I missed her right away but I was still a little high so Brock had no difficulty convincing me to go out and explore the countryside.

"Now see these mighty golden Bellsprout just swaying with that gone old breeze, Ashey Ash. Look at their careless happiness, how content they are to cuddle with Abras and Geodudes despite cultural boundaries and societal taboos. These cats are the ones we should be watching _all _the time. Ye gods, what I would _give _to be a Bellsprout right this very instant!"

In the morning Brock and I got on the bike and set out for the hills.


	4. Chapter 4

**4**

We had to go see Old Bill since we were in his neighborhood. For once, I had something to show Brock instead of the other way around. Bill was a fantastic creature, a gaunt middle-aged man who dragged his long odd body through the groves behind Cerulean tending to his potion crop and performing shooting experiments with his wife, Joan. Bill liked two kinds of shooting. He shot guns in his backyard and he shot junk in the vein. He'd been all over the world simply to find out was going on. He'd studied chemistry and medicine in faraway Hoenn, worn the Team Rocket uniform for a season in the '90s, floated among bloodthirsty sailors on the high seas and shouted curses down upon imaginary foes hiding in the tall grass of every route known to man or woman. He was also a prolific writer and had penned the computer program we use to lock Pokémon inside PCs. He was a personal friend of both Professors Oak and Elm. Bill and I had been in correspondence with one another for some time before Brock and I actually made it up to his rambling plantation-style house in the hills, and he knew we were coming.

"Ash," he said to me with an uncharacteristically kind smile and a clap on the shoulder when he saw it was us. "You finally made it down."

"Hoo-eey," Brock agreed.

We went inside and sat down on his dusty couches and looked at his seven magnificent Meowths. Bill loved Meowths. He was locked in an unending struggle for dominance with his cat harem and frequently slung buckets of water around when they would get out of hand, but he adored those hairballs. One sat presently squirming on his lap as he kneaded a fistful of scruff at the poor thing's neck.

"You boys are off on a Pokémon journey, ain't you?" Bill demanded to know.

"Hell no, Old Bill," Brock told him at once, and jumped to his feet. "We just came to see what was up."

"Well," said Bill, licking his lips and glancing wildly down a hallway, "I guess we could go out in the back yard and do a little sight seeing. You boys like marijuana?"

Brock liked everything. He loved the crazy willow trees that pulled themselves up out of Bill's good earth like the hands of giants. He climbed one, fell out, climbed another. Bill showed us some of his guns.

"Look at this," he said.

Brock and I were staring down the barrel of a shoulder-mounted metal tube done up in Soviet yellows and grays. It was a horrifying sight to behold. Bill's thin arms trembled underneath and his skull grinned its manic grin.

"Biological weaponry," he explained. "One shell and you could K-O every single Pokémon within a five-route radius. No lie. Only problem is, I don't have any more shells for it."

"Thank God," Joan put in from the porch, where she was smoking with a lovely ivory cigarette holder.

Brock began to climb on things that were not meant for climbing, including the thick fence Old Bill had constructed to keep out rival clans of Meowth. Brock teetered back and forth on it, giggling, arms out like the wings of a jet. Bill looked at him with clear sad blue eyes and said nothing. "Who's that guy?" he asked after a long while.

"Brock. He's a character."

"Yeah. Ash, hang on a minute. I've got to drop into the bathroom for just a minute to get my pre-lunch fix." He came back out a while later with a book in one hand and a look of purest serenity in his eyes. "Don't ever get started on this stuff, Ashey Boy. Worst thing that can happen to a man. Junk takes everything, and gives you nothing but insurance against junk sickness. Hell, I go through close to five million Pokédollars a week keeping up my habit, and Joan's. She only uses benzedrine."

"No junk for me, Bill." I thought of Misty, at home with her parents, and missed her.

Pretty soon Bill was feeling alive again and thought to teach us some wrestling moves for self defense. He ended up bloodying Brock's nose and locking him into a long, philosophical discussion about the existence of teleportation. Then Bill took us to his "teleporter," which was a series of two wooden boxes in his yard. The boxes were tall. They had doors like outhouses. They were connected by a rubber hose and had dull plates of metal fastened to the outsides.

"Sit in there and see if you don't teleport," he urged Brock. Brock went into the first outhouse and shut the door.

It was time to leave and to go find Misty. Brock and I said our goodbyes, accepted a few joints each ("for the route," Bill said) and bid Old Bill and Joan farewell for now. We ran down his long front lawn and leapt over the hedges at the end, right back into the heart of Cerulean.

A strange thing about Bill: I later learned that Joan was accidentally killed during one of their shooting experiments. Bill had been trying to take an Ultra Ball off the top of her head at thirty paces, like William Tell. He had missed the shot and lost Joan forever. He was acquitted; it had been an accident.


End file.
